Condemning the Congregation

Abstract

Condemning the Congregation Peter Heinegg The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Choose Political Power over Christian Values. By Ben Howe, New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2019. xiii +265 pp. $26.99 Ben Howe was raised both solidly Republican and devoutly evangelical. Born in Dallas, he moved with his family to Lynchburg, Va., where his father, Thomas Howe, did graduate work in Biblical Studies at Liberty University, worked for the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., and belonged to his Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, before moving on to become a professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary in Matthews, N.C. Ben founded a video production company, was a Tea Party activist, and blogged for the conservative website Redstate, before being fired for airing his anti‐Trump views. His book is a fierce, evangelically orthodox tirade (appropriately published by “Broadside Books”) at the vast bloc of evangelical voters, who constitute 26% of the American electorate, and roughly 80% of whom fanatically support Trump. This is an astonishing phenomenon. It has been studied in depth, for example, by Frances Fitzgerald in The Evangelicals (2017), and it will be explored by historians, sociologists, and political scientists for years to come. Howe is not a scholar or academic. This is a tormented cri de coeur at what he sees as the trashing of the Christian virtues and values he grew up believing in and thought were firmly entrenched in his own community of faith and the thousands of others around the country. It has to be said from the outset that, despite his honesty, earnestness, and self‐critical spirit, Howe has a narrow focus (he says next to nothing about evangelical perspectives on foreign policy, racism, the environment, misogyny, crime, drugs, etc.), and he’s consistently naive in exaggerating the sins of the left (where, if anywhere, would he find the leftist American equivalents of Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, Sean Hannity, or even the Reverends Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Franklin Graham?—Bill Maher on a bad day, maybe; but Stephen Colbert? Rachel Maddow? Dana Millbank? Maureen Dowd?) Howe seems to be still licking the verbal wounds inflicted on him personally by (unnamed) anti‐religious, leftist hard‐liners. But his case has merit, precisely because its strictures come from an unimpeachable, straight‐shooting insider who takes no pleasure in the indictment he has drawn up. Without specifying a particular origin or date for the evangelical movement in America, Howe says that “for decades” evangelicals have been called to reestablish Christian values as “the central doctrine of their political motivations.” That's a vague formula, but he goes on to say: Above all else we were tasked with growing God's kingdom, preserving His creation, helping the poor, and loving the downtrodden. Despite evangelical leaders' talk of character, their followers have the inverse priorities. That these leaders can't recognize that it's their hypocritical actions that have led to this gap between abstract ideals and real‐life priorities is precisely reflective of how they've chosen to misuse the mantle of leadership. By directly defying their stated desire, ignoring the character of Donald Trump, and creating a "Christian'" culture that has become divisively self‐interested and bitterly self‐righteous, these leaders have taught their flocks to value the things of the world, rather than the things of Christ. Among these leaders is Dr. Robert Jeffress (one has to wonder about the intellectual seriousness of all those televangelist doctorates), the pastor of Howe’s childhood First Baptist Church in Dallas, which has a congregation of some 13,000 members and a vast radio and TV outreach. Jeffress has gone on the record as saying that the last kind of president he'd prefer is one who governed by the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. He thinks the country needs an amoral, Machiavellian strong man not a saint. Mission acomplished. This is just one of whole series of rationales that prominent evanglicals have devised to paper over Trump's contempt for Christian, or any other kind of real, morality. Some of them compare Trump to King Cyrus of Persia, who, unbeknownst to himself, was God’s instrument for enabling the Jews to return from their exile...